The advent of the so-called "new atheists" a few years back - Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, with the late addition of long-time religion-basher Christopher Hitchens and now, it seems, philosopher Donald Dennet - was an occasion for much garment-rending, attempts to "prove" them wrong. There is, in fact, a cottage industry among conservative Christian publishing houses that continues to pour out volumes taking their arguments to task.
I kind of miss them. Especially Harris. Talk about low-hanging fruit. Dawkins, however, isn't much better, really. His major work on religion, The God Delusion, was only the opening salvo in what he understood to be the on-going project of completely destroying religion from human life.
Good luck with that.
I honestly am not fazed by atheists. Arguing with them tends to be futile; as the "arguments" (such as they may or may not be) in both Dawkins and Harris show pretty clearly, what they insist Christianity is, and what all Christians in all times and places think and do, bears no resemblance to anything resembling the complexity and contradictory nature of Christian life and belief. Their "defense" - that Christian theology is intellectually untenable fluff, beneath their notice - is a dodge. Reveling in a self-imposed ignorance, they blithely insist they have the scoop on "religion", when they prove, over the course of thousands of words, they are as ignorant as fence posts. Taking them seriously is really not worth my time.
As I remarked last week, if we are to be clear about who this God is we Christians claim to encounter in Jesus Christ, we need to think in a Trinitarian way. While it is true it is difficult to find specific references to the doctrine in the Bible, the Trinity is a good way of talking very specifically about this particular God, how this particular God has chosen to encounter us.
This is the crux of my complaint about much of the "atheism". Whether it's Dawkins' claim to have given a definitive definition of "God" and gone on to "prove" the impossibility of that God's existence, or the kind of general rejection of the "sky fairy", most of this babble has little to do with the God whom Jesus Christ calls "Father", and whom we encounter through the power of the Holy Spirit.
In other words, most of the arguments of the "new atheists" are nothing more than a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about insisting they know more than anyone else how people think, and telling them that what they think is wrong. My response is, no, we don't think about God that way, because in the first and last instance, God isn't some "thing" about which we "think", but the reality we encounter as a people called out by Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Ours is not the God we think; ours is the living God who in turn gives life.
In the first and last instance, this is my own doctrine of God. This is why the Trinity is necessary to understanding who we are as Christians. Ours is not some posited universal Idea; ours is this very specific God who has done very specific things in the past; is continuing to do them even now; and will do them in to the future. We believe these things - we don't "know" them; knowledge is such a tenuous thing in any case; belief shapes who we are far more than something as mundane as "knowledge" - because this particular God has moved among us in very specific ways.
I know of no way of starting to say who God is other than this way.
